Phurnace Blog for Wesley Willard

Austin: A Runner's Paradise

Wesley Willard — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:00:00 +0100

When I was younger, I considered running to stay in shape to be about as much fun as a root canal. Tennis, basketball, and softball occupied my time, as they provided the diversion of the particular ball that the sport involved. Now a days, however, I find myself enjoying the sheer simplicity of running. The uniform is simple, just shoes, shorts, and an optional shirt, and in Austin, you don't even have to leave your neighborhood to enjoy a great course. I'd like to share a couple of runs th [...]

No Fluff, Just Stuff

Wesley Willard — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:00:00 +0100

To a non-geek, spending a weekend in hotel conference rooms listening to presentations on the latest technologies in software development might make them beg, "just shoot me now, please". But to someone interested in keeping abreast of these sorts of things, for both company and personal reasons, it was a very nice way to do just that. Plus, it was hot as hell outside, the neighborhood pool is even hot, and the lake is just too far away.

The Lone Star Symposium was held this past weeken [...]

Spring Plays Well With JMX

Wesley Willard — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:00:00 +0100

The Spring Framework has become the most popular open source application framework in the Java space in recent years. One of its most powerful features is its ability to allow developers to create Spring Beans, which can be configured together to create an application's object graph, or data structure. The framework provides a consistent interface to accessing these beans which avoids unnecessary dependencies between components.

JMX (Java Management Extensions) is a technology that enable [...]

Choosing Open Source Carefully

Wesley Willard — Thu, 29 May 2008 01:00:00 +0100

In the last 10 years, Open Source software has provided an incredible benefit to the software development process. Most open source software projects present quality, well-tested APIs and libraries that can be quickly integrated into a product, providing much-needed functionality that does not have to be developed in-house. While there are too many projects to even begin to mention, the software produced by the Apache Project, and SpringSource provide frameworks and utilities that would t [...]

Old is Not Simple

Wesley Willard — Wed, 14 May 2008 01:00:00 +0100

Beginning in the 90’s, American software companies began farming out development work to companies overseas, or "off-shoring". These efforts mirrored what had been taking place for quite some time in other industries, such as textile manufacturing, and sent tremors through the software community. The heady days of the dot-com boom gave way to fear and gnashing of teeth in the early part of this decade. CEO’s were pictured riding astride elephants in India, and executives [...]

Tunes For Focus

Wesley Willard — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:00:00 +0100

As a software developer, maintaining concentration is something that requires discipline, and sometimes the aid of a good set of headphones, and some music. While this usually does the trick, I find that familiar music can be its own distraction, since I find myself jumping to some memory that the song brings back. In addition to this, transporting CDs back and forth from home to work is a pain.

For these, and other reasons, I've looked for alternative listening sources, a [...]

Groovin' on Groovy

Wesley Willard — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

While Robert Reeves is correct in his assessment that scripting can be evil, especially in cases where scalable and durable automation is needed (like deployments of apps),there are occasions where a script can definitely serve as a useful problem-solving tool. A script can act as another way to view an application's data, allowing the developer to verify the state of the data independently. Creating a script does not generally require the same amount of time to code/compile/edit as a regu [...]